Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand,
I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through
rotting kelp, sea cocoanuts & bamboo, the tracks led
me to their maker, a white man, his trowzers &
Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an
outsized Beaver, shovelling & sifting the cindery
sand with a tea-spoon so intently that he noticed me
only after I had hailed him from ten yards away.
Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr Henry
Goose, surgeon to the London nobility. His
nationality was no surprise. If there be any eyrie
so desolate, or isle so remote that one may there
resort unchallenged by an Englishman, 'tis not down
on any map I ever saw.

Had the doctor misplaced anything on that dismal
shore? Could I render assistance? Dr Goose shook his
head, knotted loose his 'kerchief & displayed its
contents with clear pride. 'Teeth, sir, are the
enamelled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone
by this Arcadian strand was a cannibals' banqueting
hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on
the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I
would expel cherry stones. But these base molars,
sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how? An artisan
of Piccadilly who fashions denture-sets for the
nobility pays handsomely for human gnashers. Do you
know the price a quarter pound will earn, sir?'

I confessed I did not.

'Nor shall I enlighten you, sir, for 'tis a
professional secret!'

He tapped his nose. 'Mr Ewing, are you acquainted
with Marchioness Grace of Mayfair? No? The better
for you, for she is a corpse in petticoats. Five
years have passed since this harridan besmirched my
name, yes, with imputations that resulted in my
being blackballed from Society.' Dr Goose looked out
to sea. 'My peregrinations began in that dark hour.'

I expressed sympathy with the doctor's plight.

'I thank you, sir, I thank you, but these
ivories,' he shook his 'kerchief, 'are my angels of
redemption. Permit me to elucidate. The Marchioness
wears dental-fixtures fashioned by the
aforementioned doctor. Next yuletide, just as that
scented She-Donkey is addressing her Ambassadors'
Ball, I, Henry Goose, yes, I shall arise & declare
to one & all that our hostess masticates with
cannibals' gnashers! Sir Hubert will challenge me,
predictably, "Furnish your evidence," that boor
shall roar, "or grant me satisfaction!" I shall
declare, "Evidence, Sir Hubert? Why, I gathered your
mother's teeth myself from the spittoon of the South
Pacific! Here, sir, here are some of their fellows!"
& fiing these very teeth into her tortoise-shell
soup tureen & that, sir, that will grant me my
satisfaction! The twittering wits will scald the icy
Marchioness in their news-sheets & by next season
she shall be fortunate to receive an invitation to a
Poorhouse Ball!'

In haste, I bade Henry Goose a good day. I fancy
he is a Bedlamite.

Friday, 8th November -

In the rude shipyard beneath my window, work
progresses on the jibboom, under Mr Sykes's
directorship. Mr Walker, Ocean Bay's sole taverner,
is also its principal timber-merchant & he brags of
his years as a master shipbuilder in Liverpool. (I
am now versed enough in Antipodese etiquette to let
such unlikely truths lie.) Mr Sykes told me an
entire week is needed to render Prophetess 'Bristol
fashion'. Seven days holed up in the Musket seems a
grim sentence, yet I recall the fangs of the banshee
tempest & the mariners lost o'erboard & my present
misfortune feels less acute.

I met Dr Goose on the stairs this morning&we took
breakfast together. He has lodged at the Musket
since middle October after voyaging hither on a
Brazilian merchantman, Namorados, from Feejee, where
he practised his arts in a mission. Now the doctor
awaits a long-overdue Australian sealer, the Nellie,
to convey him to Sydney. From the colony he will
seek a position aboard a passenger ship for his
native London.

My judgement of Dr Goose was unjust & premature.
One must be cynical as Diomedes to prosper in my
profession, but cynicism can blind one to subtler
virtues. The doctor has his eccentricities &
recounts them gladly for a dram of Portuguese pisco
(never to excess) but I vouchsafe he is the only
other gentleman on this latitude east of Sydney &
west of Valparaiso. I may even compose for him a
letter of introduction for the Partridges in Sydney,
for Dr Goose & dear Fred are of the same cloth.

Poor weather precluding my morning outing, we
yarned by the peat fire & the hours sped by like
minutes. I spoke at length of Tilda & Jackson & also
my fears of 'gold-fever' in San Francisco. Our
conversation then voyaged from my home-town to my
recent notarial duties in New South Wales, thence to
Gibbons, Malthus & Godwin via Leeches & Locomotives.
Attentive conversation is an emollient I lack sorely
aboard Prophetess & the doctor is a veritable
polymath. Moreover, he possesses a handsome army of
scrimshandered chessmen whom we shall keep busy
until either the Prophetess's departure or the
Nellie's arrival.

Saturday, 9th November -

Sunrise bright as a silver dollar. Our schooner
still looks a woeful picture out in the bay. An
Indian war-canoe is being careened on the shore.
Henry & I struck out for 'Banqueter's Beach' in
holy-day mood, blithely saluting the maid who
labours for Mr Walker. The sullen miss was hanging
laundry on a shrub & ignored us. She has a tinge of
black blood & I fancy her mother is not far removed
from the jungle breed.

Passing below the Indian hamlet, a 'humming'
aroused our curiosity & we resolved to locate its
source. The settlement is circumvallated by a
stake-fence, so decayed that one may gain ingress at
a dozen places. A hairless bitch raised her head,
but she was toothless & dying & did not bark. An
outer ring of ponga huts (fashioned from branches,
earthen walls & matted ceilings) grovelled in the
lees of 'grandee' dwellings, wooden structures with
carved lintel-pieces & rudimentary porches. In the
hub of this village, a public fiogging was under
way. Henry & I were the only two Whites present, but
three castes of spectating Indians were demarked.
The chieftain occupied his throne, in a feathered
cloak, while the tattooed gentry & their womenfolk &
children stood in attendance, numbering some thirty
in total. The slaves, duskier & sootier than their
nut-brown masters & less than half their number,
squatted in the mud. Such inbred, bovine torpor!
Pockmarked & pustular with haki-haki, these wretches
watched the punishment, making no response but that
bizarre, bee-like 'hum'. Empathy or condemnation, we
knew not what the noise signified. The whip-master
was a Goliath whose physique would daunt any
frontier prize-fighter. Lizards mighty & small were
tattooed over every inch of the savage's
musculature: - his pelt would fetch a fine price,
though I should not be the man assigned to relieve
him of it for all the pearls of O-hawaii! The
piteous prisoner, hoarfrosted with many harsh years,
was bound naked to an A-frame. His body shuddered
with each excoriating lash, his back was a vellum of
bloody runes but his insensible face bespoke the
serenity of a martyr already in the care of the
Lord.

I confess, I swooned under each fall of the lash.
Then a peculiar thing occurred. The beaten savage
raised his slumped head, found my eye&shone me a
look of uncanny, amicable knowing! As if a
theatrical performer saw a long-lost friend in the
Royal Box and, undetected by the audience,
communicated his recognition. A tattooed 'blackfella'
approached us & fiicked his nephrite dagger to
indicate that we were unwelcome. I enquired after
the nature of the prisoner's crime. Henry put his
arm around me. 'Come, Adam, a wise man does not step
betwixt the beast & his meat.'

Q&A: Book World Talks With David
Mitchell

Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page BW03

We found the author of
"Cloud Atlas" in the Irish fishing
village of Clonakilty, where he lives
with his wife and daughter. Born in the
English town of Seaport 34 years ago, he
also has lived in Sicily and Hiroshima,
Japan.

BW: What was the
inspiration for "Cloud Atlas"?

DM: There wasn't really
a single Eureka moment. For me, novels
coalesce into being, rather than arrive
fully formed. That said, three important
sources spring to mind. First, If on
a Winter's Night a Traveler, by
Italo Calvino -- an experimental novel
in which a sequence of narratives is
interrupted but never picked up again --
made a big impression on me when I was
an undergraduate. I wondered what a
novel might look like if a mirror were
placed at the end of a book like
Calvino's so that the stories would be
resolved in reverse.

Second, a mention of the
Moriori people in Jared Diamond's
multidisciplinary Guns, Germs, and
Steel led to a trip to the Chatham
Islands and an encounter with New
Zealand historian Michael King's A
Land Apart. His idea that there is
nothing inevitable about civilization
caught my curiosity. Knowledge can be
forgotten as easily as, perhaps more
easily than, it can be accrued. As a
people, the Moriori "forgot" the
existence of any other land and people
but their own. When I heard this, my
novelistic Geiger counter crackled.

Third, a book by Frederick
Delius's amanuensis, Eric Fenby,
Delius: As I Knew Him, was worlds
away from the Moriori but gave me the
idea of Fenby's evil twin, and the
struggle between the exploited and the
exploiter.

Perhaps all human interaction
is about wanting and getting. (This
needn't be as bleak as it sounds -- a
consequence of getting can be giving,
which presumably is what love is about.)
Once I had these two ideas for novellas,
I looked for other variations on the
theme of predatory behavior -- in the
political, economic and personal arenas.
These novellas seemed to marry well with
the structure I had in mind: Each block
of narrative is subsumed by the next,
like a row of ever-bigger fish eating
the one in front.

BW: What did you
learn in the process of writing it?

DM: I learned that art
is about people: Ideas are well and
good, but without characters to hang
them on, fiction falls limp. I learned
that language is to the human experience
what spectography is to light: Every
word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a
genealogy, a social set of possible
users, and that although a writer must
sometimes pretend to use language
lightly, he should never actually do so
-- the stuff is near sacred. I learned
that maybe I should have a go at a
linear narrative next time! I learned
that the farther back in time you go,
the denser the research required, and
the more necessary it is to hide it.

BW: Did you write it as
six separate stories?

DM: I did, but put
indications where I would later cut and
paste the novel into its final shape.
The day I decided to do it that way was
one of the major finishing posts of the
novel. (I went to feed the ducks.)

BW: What was your
model (which is something quite
different from inspiration)?

DM: Each of the six
sections has a model. My character Ewing
was (pretty obviously) Melville, but
with shorter sentences. Frobisher is
Christopher Isherwood, especially in
Lions and Shadows. Luisa Rey is any
generic airport thriller. Cavendish is
Cavendish -- he has a short part in the
"London" section of my first novel,
Ghostwritten. The interview format
for "Sonmi" I borrowed from gossip
magazines in which a rather gushing hack
interviews some celeb bigwig. Zachary
owes (of course) a big debt to
Riddley Walker, a novel by Russell
Hoban, though some reviewers point to
"Mad Max 3." (Thanks guys.) I can't
claim that Don DeLillo's monumental
Underworld is a model for Cloud
Atlas, but reading him always
encourages me (like drinking) to take
literary risks. (Both books, I just
noticed, have upbeat endings, against
the odds.)

BW:What, in your
mind, distinguishes this book from your
others?

DM: It
has more of a conscience. I think this
is because I am now a dad. I need the
world to last another century and a
half, not just see me to happy old age.
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